THE BLESSING OF A LIMINAL DAY by Penny Dolan

                                                                    

 Last Friday,  I had a gift: a day's space when everything stopped.

 On Tuesday, I had driven, at rather short notice, down south.  On Wednesday I had attended the funeral of a long-lived but complicated relative  Thank you for your kind thoughts but but no sympathies needed.

 On Thursday, I visited a once-known house. I was able to walk through rooms and  into the garden I remembered  from a decade and more before. I could go all the way down to the huge oak tree that still stood by the gate that led to the field beyond and remember who and what what I wanted to remember.

                                   

 I collected a few old photographs and personal memorabilia, had coffee with my even-further-down-south brother and called in on an old friend who lives in the village.  All done, and a blessed sense of completion and closure. Friday was to be another, slightly nostalgic visit.

However, as I queued in my car going north through the Blackwall Tunnel, the first radio rumblings began. Something about a possible lack of petrol? Ah. Well, yes. By evening the rumblings were louder. We were not to panic.

Friday arrived. Definitely don't panic! I had petrol for Saturday's drive back to Yorkshire, complete with A1M traffic jams, but that was all.

So I opted out of the intended visit - but what was I to do with the unexpectedly free day ahead? My complicated WIP was at home, so I was out of reach of its mutterings and grumblings and the horrid loopholes in its latest version.                         

I was also in a space that wasn't mine so nothing in the house or garden was shouting at me to Be Sorted Out or Done.                           

                                                                                                                                     

Instead I spent an idle day sitting around, doing almost nothing, enjoying the garden, the sunlight on the pond, mulling over a few of the memories stirred by the funeral, and walking around the neighbourhood for a while, admiring the last of the roses. Being, I suppose, in the moment. 

 

                                

What exactly was the day? Not lazy. Not useless.  It felt as if an awkward thing was over and the new pattern had not quite arrived. It was a day "between" - and suddenly a more lovely word popped into my head; 

"Liminal."

A photographer had used this term, describing his image of a misty beach, where the water and the land met, neither one thing nor the other. 

                 

I'd heard the word used for the narrow semi-wild strip of land that lay between the built-upon areas and the farmland not far from my own home: a  place waiting and not waiting for another turn of the planning rules, the habitat of half-hidden wildlife and determined plants. There had even been a book written about it.

                                     

 

That Friday was almost like time suspended, a day when all I could do was accept that knowledge, wait out the liminal hours, and enjoy - without guilt or anxiety - the beauty of that moment.  I could think, I could imagine I could be.

Liminal, that's what the day was.

It was a welcome reminder to take time out now and then, to value the creative moments where energies can rest before the whatever-next starts to happen.

 

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After I signed this post off a few hours ago, I thought about picking up my latest project tomorrow. Suddenly, the act of writing seemed to fit in with this concept:  work done when one is neither totally in this world nor entirely in the world of one's own imagination.

Yes, that's it, don't you think? 

Writing itself a liminal activity?

 

Penny Dolan

@pennydolan1

ps Written with apologies to and sympathy for all those people who did have serious trouble or sadness or were in danger or had appointments cancelled as a result of the lack of petrol.

 

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